By Frank J. Diekmann
Below is what we all were supposed to be talking about and doing this week. And next. And next…
I’m finally arriving at the conference registration area just a short half-mile from the hotel check-in when he sees me before I see him and he darts out from behind one of those six-foot fake ferns hotels buy in bulk.
“Frank! Good to see ya; how ya doin’?” he says, thrusting out a semi-sweaty palm for a hearty handshake.
I step aside so the mob in the crowded hallway can pass.
“Good, good, buddy,” I respond returning the handshake, absently noticing as the taller among us do, the top of those ferns are never dusted and you could probably plant new ferns up there.
He and I are on the CU conference circuit and have seen each other at six, maybe eight other meetings so far this year. Every week there’s multiple credit union conferences and they seem to proliferate like memes and they just keep growing and growing and…
I’m not quite even sure in which cities we’ve been crossing paths, just that there’s been a lot of crossing. He’s with a vendor, I know that, but I’m not introducing you because I haven’t a clue to his name. Gary? Glen? The only thing I know is his name starts with a G.
Road Warrior Stories
“How was the trip in?” he asks.
“Flight was oversold, like they always are. We were all over each other; guy in front of me reclined his seat like he needed me to do a teeth cleaning. Atlanta airport was packed. The usual,” I answer as I watch a group of attendees arrive and begin hugging each other like it’s a family reunion.
“Ain’t it always,” the other guy, Gary or Glen—maybe George?—shrugs. “Really, I hate flying anymore. Be nice to be on an empty flight sometime, huh? And an empty airport? Man, I’d like to see that day; that would be some sort of great. Airport all to yourself—a business traveler’s dream, right?”
His eyes light up. “Or even better, just gettin’ to stay home for a while and never having to leave. How great would that be?”
Over near the conference registration desk I see and hear a guy in a credit union-logoed polo shirt that was thrown in by a marketing firm as part of the CU’s rebranding as he coughs up one-and-a-half lungs, and several attendees walk over and drop an arm over his shoulder and offer him some water from the public cooler against the wall. The water seems to do the trick and the guy stops coughing—only to start sneezing. “I’m sure I’ll be…fine and all…three days…won’t be like this,” he manages to blurt out between sneezes, before high fiving the water-bearing Good Samaritans.
“Yeah, that does sound nice,” I respond. “But even the red eyes are sardine cans now.”
The Other Upside Down
The other guy—maybe he’s Grant or even Gustav?—nods, sharing that the only thing more crowded than his flight was the taxi line at the airport, where everyone and their luggage had been squeezed together on a narrow sidewalk waiting area and taxi cabs had been in short supply after so many jammed flights had arrived simultaneously.
“Yeah, my Uber driver said she’d already made a couple of airport runs that day; I was her fourth,” I tell him.
I think about sharing with Gavin or Graham how much I always enjoy talking to Uber drivers, learning about their lives, who they’ve met, where they’re from. I had sat up front in a rather snug Honda as she related how she had plenty of work already at a travel agency and this was just a side gig, and because there was so much work she just turned it on and off when she felt like it, as if it was some sort of bonus income spigot.
And in the TMI department, after I told her I was in town for a credit union conference, she divulged details I hadn’t asked about on the vehicle’s financing, into which she had rolled an earlier auto loan and nothing more than a 99-buck down payment, and now she was so upside-down in her loan I couldn’t believe we weren’t tires to the sky, falling out of our leather seats and hanging from the shoulder harnesses.
“I’m not worried about it; I got the car for this side gig and the side gig is for paying off the loan,” she explains. Yes, I’m tempted to explain the financial futility of that rationale, but opt to let it go.
Nailing It
After nearly blurting out the anecdote to Gordon or Gerald I bite my tongue—he’s with a vendor, after all, and is a highly trained professional at ensuring you can’t leave a conversation without some sort of sale, so I instead nod in the direction of the registration desk and remind that I still need to grab my name tag.
“Oh, thanks for the reminder,” says G—was the name something exotic, I start to think, perhaps a Griffin or a Gunnar?—and he fishes inside a sports jacket that has seen the inside of more hotel ballrooms and convention center than any respectable sports jacket should—and retrieves his own name tag.
His name is Martin. So I nailed that.
I approach the registration desk where the woman working the line for people whose last names start with A-D recognizes me from all the earlier shows. She grabs my name badge and runs her hands through a dozen conference bags—because after having run out of kids to pawn them off on after they wised up and realized dad hadn’t bought them an exclusive “backpack”—she knows I don’t want one, and she hands over what I really want, the conference pocket agenda. (The conference app is nice, but it still doesn’t beat an old-fashioned paper schedule.)
Warning, Warning
“Oh, wait,” she says suddenly, looking as if she had left the gas on at home. “I need the name tag back.”
I already know what’s coming—she reaches into a drawer and retrieves a big red “PRESS” ribbon, peels off an adhesive strip and attaches it to the bottom of my name tag, apparently as some sort of warning to the other attendees. I’m wondering if maybe there will also be a blinking light. Or a horn.
Still, she’s nice about it, and I want to thank her by name, but my track record in that department isn’t so swell so I just let her know how good it is to see her—and it is—and I offer a sincere thank you. I don’t even know if she heard me, as she’s busy with all the arrivals queued through the velvet ropes like it’s Space Mountain and nobody has a Fast Pass. They’re expecting a thousand or more attendees at the conference, and the line reminded of a conversation I had had with her several conferences back at which she had remarked it was work that could be exhausting, but it was good to know she had a job for life.
Things Never Change
I pause and page through the meeting agenda before trekking back to the hotel, which is just two sets of escalators up and two more down, a tunnel and long rope bridge over a faux river away.
The breakouts all look familiar. How to Deal With Surging Auto Loan Volume. Onboarding All the New Members. How to Retrain Collectors When They Don’t Have Loans to Collect. Preparing for a Rising Rate Environment. I slide it into my own jacket pocket but not before noticing there’s a big reception this evening with carving stations and food carts and more.
I realize things will never change.
Frank J. Diekmann is Cooperator in Chief at CUToday.info and can be reached at Frank@CUToday.info.